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When I tried to find out more about those 10 years ago, a lot of sources were old and hard to find, but with a bit of persistence I found some PDFs and websites on a system called "Gregg Shorthand". Fortunately today it's right there on Wikipedia for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand
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> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the wor…
Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.) I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out…
This is completely wrong. Current machine translation struggles not because languages are hard, but because translation is an inherently hard problem. Humans can only translate reasonably after years of training. Semanticists can only provide a formal logical treatment of very small fragments of language, which indicates that a logical language would be either incomplete or not completely formal.
The bottom line is that translation involves understanding meaning, which involves a lot of interpretation and world knowledge, which is very difficult to put into a computer, whatever the kind of language you're trying to translate.
Compared to this, speech recognition has been relatively successful, so a language with a phonemic alphabet is not very urgent.
The usual habit to develop ones own handwriting style when using this, makes it something rather unique to each individual. This also improves writing speed because you optimize the letters to suit your own writing style. We both (friend and me) use it as a form of poor-man's-cryptography for diaries and stuff we write in public (trains, buses, etc).
My friend's Elian compared to mine is almost unrecognisable at first glance. But if you understand the few basic rules for the writing system, you can read either of our versions very effectively in only a short amount of time. And those rules are preposterously simple. You do not have to memorize different shapes for each letter of the alphabet. That's a definite plus.
Last time your project came up, I wanted to ask if you've done any research into the various already existing shorthand writing systems ? When I tried to find out more about those 10 years ago, a lot of sources were old and hard to find, but with a bit of persistence I found some PDFs and websites on a system called "Gregg Shorthand". Fortunately today it's right there on Wikipedia for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
There's a potential to borrow some of the concepts while typing in dotsies, utilizing some of the many possible modifier keys that having the alphabet on both hands opens up (hold down c with one hand and typing h with the other hand, etc.).
Not sure if this is worth the effort, but brilliant approach to learning. I've often had fun playing with inventing my own alphabets and stuff -- if you could actually learn to read this font at a decent speed, it would be fun to click a bookmarklet anytime you wanted some privacy :) I love reading, and I read pretty fast - I've often thought that the existing approach in most textbooks where they give you a short (5…
Very interesting thoughts! > it would be fun to click a bookmarklet You can grab a bookmarklet for this at dotsies.org (the blue button).
This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it--…
When you read Simpel-Fonetik words, you must pay attention to each letter. Remember: each letter has always the same sound, the sound given in the Simpel-Fonetik alphabet, regardless what letter is next to it.
And here it is re-written in Simpel-Fonetik:
Wen ju riid Simpel-Fonetik wörds, ju mast pei ätenshon tu iitsh leter. Rimember: iitsh leter häs olweis the seim saund, the saund given in the Simpel-Fonetik alfabet, rigaardles wat leter is nekst tu it.
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Very interesting thoughts! > it would be fun to click a bookmarklet You can grab a bookmarklet for this at dotsies.org (the blue button).
Could you make this bookmarklet toggle between regular/dotsies?
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Omg, there should totally be a game like that to help people learn!
Ok, here's a start: http://dotsies.org/game/ You can move it around with the arrow keys. It says "alien". Now what should it do?
Or any kind of game where you have to type words to advance. In fact, while we're already on the Space Invaders idea, you could make a clone where the invaders represent common words and to destroy them you have to type them out. Oh, and the invaders shoot single letters or two-letter combinations which you can type out to defend against. Also, you have to defeat the invaders from bottom up and to shoot at one you have to move into it's line below it, So you have to choose between dodging by typing out an invader in a different line or defending against a shot.